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Free Alternatives to MS Office
- Thread starter haremite
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Keynote is free on the Mac and can do PowerPoint. As for the rest, aside from the other Apple apps such as Pages and Sheets, there's also Libre Office...
The Apple apps in iWork all do the trick really well. Both for presentations with Keynote (the star of the show - much better than PowerPoint), Pages (similar to Word but with a page-layout origin, rather than a word processing origin. These days it does both, though most people think word is more feature rich, though for my use Pages works better), and Numbers which is similar to Excel. All come free with newer Macs and iOS devices.
There's also Libre Office which is most Linux users' preferred choice, and it runs on any OS. There's also AbiWord if you need something lighter. It is such a lightweight piece of software it could run on a potato. And there's of course Open Office too.
Depending on what you use the word processor for, there are many other alternatives too, but those are the most feature rich, big names.
There's also Libre Office which is most Linux users' preferred choice, and it runs on any OS. There's also AbiWord if you need something lighter. It is such a lightweight piece of software it could run on a potato. And there's of course Open Office too.
Depending on what you use the word processor for, there are many other alternatives too, but those are the most feature rich, big names.
Thanks. Can any of these word programs be saved as pdf, txt, etc? I need word for cover letters, resumes, college papers, that sort of stuff.
All of them, yes.
They can do it natively too, but in macOS, anything that can be printed can be saved as PDF from the print menu too
I would say that iWork (Pages/Numbers/Keynote) can do those things provided that you will only be sharing the results in .PDF format. However, college papers may be a problem depending upon the formatting that the instructor requires for papers in that course.
LibreOffice will easily handle all of those things and I agree with those who recommended it.
This seems like the best solution. Although I'm 100% macOS, I need to use Word/PPT/Excel for work via O365. For personal use, I typically used Office 2011 for Mac, but it's time to move on. I think I will try to make the leap to Pages/Numbers/Sheets. I already created an Office.com account, so I can see "real" Word/PPT/Excel in a browser to look for formatting issues.
The limitation of using the web version of Office is that formatting can be affected by the use of non-standard fonts. By non-standard, I'm not referring to some wild Star Trek font or symbol/dingbat font, but more mainstream fonts. It's not always an issue, since font-substitution for display works well most of the time... but not all the time. Something to keep in mind.
I'm a big fan of iWork, it is my go-to productivity suite. If the task can't be accomplished in that, only then will I go to something else.
I'm also fan of the web version of MS Office. I find it to be highly functional and is far superior to the iOS and Android versions. I can be more productive using web Office on a chromebook than using the Android or iOS versions of MS Office.